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BT faces £17m bill for pensions protection
Nick Goodway11 Feb 2009
Telecoms giant BT faces a near-£17 million bill after it was ordered to make several years of payments into the scheme that covers pensions when firms go bust.
The European Commission today ruled that the UK Government had been wrong to exempt the former British Telecom from the guarantee scheme.
BT has already set aside £16.6 million to cover all the payments due since the Pension Protection Fund was set up in 2004. It has yet to put aside a payment for the year that ends in March.
A spokesman said it was "quite likely" that BT would appeal against the ruling and the amount involved.
BT was given a state guarantee on its pension liabilities when it was privatised in 1984. When the Pension Protection Fund was established, the law exempted firms with state guarantees from paying the levy on those parts of their liabilities.
That means that since 2004 BT has paid no levy on behalf of people it employed before 1984, but has on those taken on since then.
Reader views (1)
Bt & this country should ignore this ruling. The exemption was agreed by the Government of the day set in law and should be left intact. Recently this Government has followed or introduced a raft of retrospective laws that basically could make criminals of us all. It seems strange that this morally corrupt labour Government have pursued BT offering them no backing whatsoever and hey presto their equally corrupt partners in the EU back them with this ruling. We have no fishing industry left the banks have been allowed to disintigrate the Gas & Electricity are all run by our EU partners forcing us to pay more than themselves and it looks like BT will be next. Strange how this would never happen in France but then they have a government that believes 1st in France with the rest coming 2nd. With any luck the Tories when back in power will also bring in a number of retrospective laws that just happen to allow them to arrest this bunch of freeloaders.
- Den, London, 12/02/2009 08:22
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